JPJones.co.uk

Since 2004 I’ve been a user of the rather excellent MythTV software – its open-source Personal Video Recorder (PVR) softare which runs on commodity PC hardware and is highly configurable. I originally ran it in dual front-end and back-end mode in the lounge, using Fedora running off of an ABIT BP6 (Dual Celeron), with it connected to the TV. A Hauppauge PVR-350 was installed, which was used to record Analogue TV as MPG files, and used to display the MythTV interface and video. Back then it took a couple of days fiddling around with settings to get a stable and working system – the PVR-350 causing most of the issues.

Fast forward 5 years to the present, and I’ve been through upgrades, re-installs due to the boxes dying (one was a blown motherboard through a dodgy power supply).

I’m now running MythTV in back-end only mode, using a low power VIA PC1500 Platform Motherboard, with 1.5TB of disk space, 2GB Ram, and a Hauppauge Nova-T-500 (Dual Digital Tuners). This box sits in the spare room, with an internal ariel providing the feed for Freeview. I have the box connected to my home network via a pair of ZyXEL PLA 400’s, which connects nodes via the electricity wires already in my flat.
I’m stilling running MythTV, but instead of spending hours upon hours building and configuring MythTV from scratch, I now use a purpose-built distribution of MythTV called MythDora. This distribution is based on Fedora (Current Version is 10), and after doing everything manually from the command line, I have to say this distribution is outstanding – configuration was straightforward and painless, and one I easily recommend.

My current box runs in Backend-mode only. This is accessed via web interface which allows me to select what programs to record. It also allows me to download recorded programs to my PC to view locally. MythTV also has UPnP AV MediaServer built into it, which means the recorded content can be shared on a network with any devices which can understand this protocol. In my case, this means to view the recorded content on my TV in the lounge, I’ve a choice of either AppleTV, which I’ve hacked to run Boxee, or Playstation 3, which natively shows the content on MythTV.

I’ve also got PHP installed on this box, and have built a Twitter interface for MythTV (Coded in PHP), so it Tweets completed recordings to a special account I have setup. If anyone wants a copy of this, just let me know.